Tretton

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

They left late this afternoon, Roz and Ted,  for New York City to spend a week, through Three Kings Day, with Roz's son, Bart, his significant other, Dominga, and her son, Alfredo, the pocket Junot Diaz.* I was invited but declined. So, I am staying home, but I will not be home alone: They have arranged for Nils Sundstrøm to stay with me while they are gone.
        What he gets in return, I don't know. My company?

Apparently, not only mine, for he has just asked me if he could have a friend over to spend the night New Year's Eve.

And I recall:

        One of my colleagues at Bretagne, a diminutive, always dandy Austrian with thick black hair, neatly trimmed Van Dyke, and, at the time, a young bride that no one ever saw. He taught both German and Spanish, having lived growing up six months with his father and his paramour in Vienna and six months with his mother and hers in Valencia. He also wrote pornographic novels under the pseudonym Guillaume Vibescu. I call them novels though, while the settings were lush, the sex scenes particularly graphic, every protuberance and every orifice in play and overflowing into heart-stopping orgasms, there was no plot. Not that plot was required, I suppose; but there was only a series of scenes coming to conclusion (apparently always) in a railway station.

Nils brings him, my former colleague to mind, for in the only of his many efforts, successes actually, I read, one of the characters is, like Nils, a failed Lutheran pastor though in Stockholm. The hero of the story, I suppose, seduced by one after another of fresh-faced, merrily amoral sisters and cousins (daughters and nieces of his landlady), a dozen in all, until both raw and chastened, he sets off penitent for a hermitage outside Boden in the far north. He is on his way, when a note from another of the girls' relations, Tretton ( Swedish for Thirteen, also the name of the novel), catches up with him (we have no idea how) at Centralstation, as he is about to embark. We leave him standing there, head bowed,  suitcase in right hand and note in left.
                                                         12/30/23
_______________
* See here.

The trick - or one trick

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

The trick - or one trick - is not to need help too often, which involves a second trick: patience, allowing the time it takes to will your body to do the things it used to do without thought and to put up with how (howlingly) long it takes the will to complete its work. Also to be satisfied - at least to put up with - the shoddy job it does, trusting, for example, that your underwear will fall into proper, comfortable place eventually, preferably before the day is out. Also, it does no good to complain to yourself about what your self can do only so well. That is, unless you can laugh the complaint off, imagine a crabby complaint-desk in a cartoon or a clueless complaint-desk in a sketch: Tim Conway managing it on "Carol Burnett."

I mentioned Polly.* She comes over early on Boxing Day. She leaves our pan of lasagna and picks up Roz to deliver a dozen more. She wears a Santa hat and brings one for Roz. They will be gone all day.
        When they return, they brew cocktails, a blenderful of something white and foamy, and they sit at the kitchen table and . . . . Surprise! - they are talking politics in the dining room, though more about how useless it is to follow them, since there is no changing the "clown minds" of politicians (or pundits). It is Roz's phrase, "clown minds."

When Polly left, I asked her what it meant. She'd doffed her Santa hat for her jovial friend to take home for next year. Her hair was slightly mussed. She looked at me looking at her from the front-room doorway and raised a hand as if to smooth it, but stopped, opened her hand to the air and dropped back onto the table.
        "You overheard?" She isn't accusatory, but curious. Still:
        "I was listening. Sorry."
        "No. It's okay."
        "So?" Meaning "What does it mean, then?" She gets that.
        "You can't stop them from cramming themselves to beyond full into that little car,"
she said.                                                                                                                                   12/27/23
_______________
* About Polly. (Editor's note.) These are two posts almost worth re-reading: "Dateline: Pangloss, CA" and "The Friday Before" (and its conclusion, "A bit of everything.")

350th Birthday

 from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

Uncle Albert in his La Rochefoucauld
at Cannes in 1963 sweater vest

I was still in bed after nine. I was sitting up but wondering if I was going to get up. A gentle rap on the door. Ted came in, dressed for Boxing Day, meaning not at all: he isn't going out from the manor to deliver boxes; the manor is coming to him, Roz's crazy friend What's-her-name, who brings all her minions a pan of lasagna each year. Faded jeans and a ragged-at-the-sleeve-ends Bretagne College sweatshirt, once gray, the logo once maroon: In luctando lux.
          "Can I show you something?" He meant could he help me get up if I needed it, help me get dressed if I needed that? Who said this?: Discretion is the better part of valor. Discretion, meaning in this case accepting help when needed, is the better part of valor, meaning being stubbornly independent when you cannot be.
          What he wanted to show me (he said) were quotes Gaspar Stephens sent to him from commonplace book he found in the back of drawer, which he was compiling in one of his years in sub-Saharan Africa, whose god-forsakenness I have avoided even as I have admired the French spoken by the former-colonists there. (And it isn't, truth be known - and admitted - any more god-forsaken than the rural-Virginia county we live in. But it lacks the amenities we have, central heat and air, dental care, and a church on every third corner, many with a sign out front compiling its own commonplace book.)
          He  doesn't share, my adoptive grand nephew, as many do - to impose their views. He has no views, no more than a cat has views. He shares out of a genuine good nature (if there can be such a thing in this god-forsaken world.) (The depths of my despair are deep today; but I only pretend. I don't truly despair, I only wish I could because I do know there is no hope.)

There is this (from Emil Cioran to Gaspar Stephens to Ted to me):

Even the skeptic in love with his doubts turns out to be a fanatic of skepticism. Man is the dogmatic being par excellence; and his dogmas are all the deeper when he does not formulate them, when he is unaware of them, and when he follows them.
      We all believe in many more things than we think, we harbor intolerances, we cherish bloody prejudices, and, defending our ideas with extreme means, we travel the world like ambulatory and irrefragable fortresses. Each of us is a supreme dogma to himself; no theology protects its god as we protect ourself, and if we assail this self with doubts and call it into question, we do so only by a pseudo-elegance of our pride: the case is already won.

Which reminded me of this sentence of La Rochefoucauld: Il n'y a point de gens qui aient plus souvent tort que ceux qui ne peuvent souffrir d'en  avoir. - Nobody is more often wrong than the one that cannot bear being wrong.
          Because of the way certainty and wrong-headedness must accumulate together.
                                                                                                                                            12/26/2023                                                                                                  

Abelard and What's-her-name

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

In his worn jeans and ancient Norse sweater, on one of those days more than others, when he looks like a cross between a ghost (Casper) and one of Peter Pan's boys, friendly and lost, Ted was showing me two of his posts from Advent two years ago.* I'm not sure why, except that he was looking for a few clucks of approval. I gave him three: "Cluck, cluck. Cluck." But what he doesn't get, as he squints at life, always a little out of focus, is that religion doesn't want to be as thoughtful as he thinks it ought to be. At one time maybe, for a long time - from the Council of Nicea until the death of Calvin and even a little after - but even his friend Axel Sundstrøm, bless his heart as they say in Alabama, wants to read mysteries in the evening and watch football on Sunday afternoons. He doesn't really want to talk about "hypostatic union," whatever he pretends (or I will be).
          Because I will have to say this for Ted's Advent argument: the preacher has finally to make a choice between the love of Sweet Jesus and the judgment of Cosmo Christ. Or so it looks to me, too.

I am standing before the Judgment Seat; or I am sitting at my pupil's desk with the Final Examination before me, and the question is multiple choice on theories of the atonement - defend your choice. And I am going with Abelard, not the most thoughtful of the theories (or hypotheses, I'd say) but the closest to what I think Jesus, who will lay aside his outer garment and wash his followers feet, who laid aside his equality with God to become human, would come up with.
     "The Kingdom of God is like a teacher that had one good idea in his life, and it wasn't seducing one of his students when she was fifteen and he was almost forty. It was about
the love of God. Who have ears, let them hear."                                                                     12/23/23

* (Here and the one following.)

Eleven in the morning

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

"How long have we been taking him to Dr. Feight?" I asked Roz, as if we had been taking him - he can drive. "I think I took him first in January '17," Roz said. "Why?"
          I shook my head. I didn't want to say, "Do you think it's done any good?" because I knew we couldn't tell. It wasn't as if we had two identical Teds, one seeing Dr. Feight and the other not. Then, the question could just as well be, "Do you think it's done any harm?"
          But it has been twice a week since then, I think, though I have trouble keeping track. Sometimes twice, sometimes once, sometimes three times maybe. Sometimes not at all because everyone, even psychiatrists, must take a vacation now and again.
          And how do "we" afford it? A combination of Ted's disability and Roz's insurance and Dr. Feight's good graces is what I imagine. I write this tonight because we went again today.
          Eleven in the morning. I read the magazines in French in the waiting room, the ones Dr. Feight subscribes to for me - Paris Match, Charlie Hebdo, L'Express, an ever-changing array. "We" are paying him too well, je crois. Then, we go home to a lunch which Ted fixes, or sometimes we go out. 

Today, we met the mordanted Axel, the model of Norse Lutheran pain and gloom except on Midtsommarnatt, when he runs, or trots, naked through College Heights at the hinge of light and dark. (Part of the ritual: his neighbors draw their curtains five minutes before sunset. Or so I have been told.) He asked Ted how it went. Ted said, "Fine." And that was that or would have been had I not said, "Any letters from dead Moira lately?" But he said, "No." Then, that was that.
          We ate the savory lentil soup, which our waitress, not much bigger than a mouse and dressed in mousy, anti-Christmas colors, brought us in heaping bowls. We drank our oatmeal stouts, Axel and I - Ted drank water. And we spoke of other things - the frigid weather, the last-night's Eagles-Seahawks game, and the septation of the "United" Methodist Church as the pro-gays and the anti-gays fought on a bloody, muddy field for the love of their different gods.                                                                                                                                           12/19/23

Too much dress-up

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

Last night, they went to a Christmas party, Roz and Ted. And he came home complaining of eating too many bourbon balls, who should eat none with the medications he is taking. Then he woke up this morning feeling "less than well." What he meant by that only he knows entirely, but one hopes not as unwell as he looked, who always looks in his movements a bit dozy anyway. Part of what he meant, however, was that he couldn't go to church; he didn't want to be running out in the middle of it.
        Roz said she would take me if I really wanted to go, but I said that was okay. I did not say that I didn't want to go with her. But there are enough distractions - the service itself provides enough distractions - without her blowing silent raspberries, not to mention the heavy sighs she tries to muffle. Because there's too much dress-up for her, she says, the copes and capes and the chasubles and the chwhatever else they are called the priest dresses in; there's too much dress-up in the language, too, she says: the ill-doings that God prefers we his people not to walk in. That kind of stuff - a dozen words for the one, sin.

There was time, then, before the Arsenal v. Brighton & Hove Albion match, to read the passages for the Third Sunday in Advent. Which are these: Isaiah 64:1-4, 8;11; I Thessalonians 5:16-24; and John 1:6-8, 19-28. The Psalm is 126.       
          Among other things, the letter says this: "Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the word of the prophets, but test everything." Which could be interpreted as: "Do not quench the Spirit or the prophets, but test them both." According to what, however? This is Paul, so the answer is not "the teachings of Jesus," about which he knows absolutely nothing. Is it then "the teachings of Paul"?
          This is the earliest of the letters. Still, Paul has been out there teaching for a while, the Paul that will say, "If anyone teaches you anything I haven't taught you, don't believe it." "I am that sure of it, what I have taught you. (You will note that I have not disguised anything in parables.)"

Clearly, I don't have to go to church to listen to someone wiggle around and preach what she wanted to all along. (The lectionary is no proof against that, whatever its proud claims.) I can lull myself to theological sleep by preaching my own sweet Jesus, teller of tales, enumerator of the beatitudes, healer of the sick, the one that touched the lepers and defied the leaders and the Law. The one that said that - and proved that - love is more important than law and, more especially, than the interpreters of the law. Who, like the poor preacher, and like me, will decide what they want it to mean. And that will be that, because no one escapes the Beast of Certainty.

Except Arsenal, which can be brilliantly certain but only until it is time to strike.
                                                                                                                                                 12/17/23

God's Little Acre

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

So this is the kind of thing he does, Ted. Someone, anyone, mentions Erskine Caldwell to him, just in passing, and he decides he has to reread God's Little Acre, which he's sure he has but he doesn't, though he does have Tobacco Road. But it's not Tobacco Road that he wants to read, not that he remembers much of either of them, characters or plot. But he does remember, he says, how they felt, and it is God's Little Acre he wants to read again. Because someone mentioned Caldwell to him. In passing.
         So he finds a copy online somewhere, and he shuts himself away for an afternoon and an evening.

In between, at supper, he asks me if I knew Erskine Caldwell, and when I ask "How could I have?" he says he doesn't know but "You've known a lot of people." I shrug. I have, but no one more famous than the police chief of Paradise, Michigan. But he's thinking of the picture he's going to get his alter ego mel ball to make, me with Caldwell.

"What did you think of the book?" I ask him.
          "It's funny about these books I've read before, even the ones I bought for under two bucks in the seventies and eighties. I remember every word as soon as I read it again, but I never know what's going to happen next."
          He is the sweetest guy, but he's absolutely nuts. Or, not absolutely, not dangerously. As I said, he is "sweet." But his brain was set in his head or, I think, at some point it was reset - I don't remember his being an odd kid . . . . In any case, it's now askew. The hemispheres are out of line.
          "What's it about, the book?" I ask him.
          "Three things, at least: looking  for gold where there is none, shooting people who might be getting in your way, and religion." Then he paused. He was thinking. "No four: oral sex."
          He looked away and looked back again. "Cunnilingus." Once more he paused. " Why does that word sound so nasty?" he half-sang under his breath, turning away again, heading into the next room, probably thinking that anyone that might have had his picture "taken" with Erskine Caldwell wouldn't catch the reference.
                                                                                         12/15/23

Monday, Monday.

Uncle Albert in his E for Eucharist
letter vest, crudely imagined by Ted Riich

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

Today I called the church to ask Miss Virginia why we could eat the bread and wine and then drink the wine but couldn’t dip the bread and wine into the wine and take both and then (at the same time) both. [See here.] But she wasn’t in. So, I asked the secretary, whose name is Kaylee (or Kaileigh or Caleigh or another of the 84 variants, all pronounced K long a, L long e with the accent variously distributed); I asked her since she must have asked Father Susan when she typed it into the bulletin in red: Don't do this!, but she (K-Lee) didn’t know because she hadn’t. Asked.
          “Do you want me to have her call you?” she did ask.
          “No,” I said. “But if you find out, please call me. Thanks,” I found myself saying because I found myself thinking this was another of those things better to learn second-hand, if at all.
                                                                                                                                                        12/11/23

Yesterday once more.

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

Ted took me to church this morning. He is good about that even when it’s difficult, as this morning because it was raining. And Miss Virginia will carry the Gospel down into the congregation as she always does, even when the eight o’clock congregation is only seven because of the rain; and she will carry it back up into the chancel and replace it on the lectern. She’ll come back down, producing the envelope she has written her sermon on the back of from a pocket in her regalia one cannot see. It is not as magic as the Eucharist when she changes the accidents into essences though the accidents remain the same; but it is a mystery nevertheless.
          Since sometime near the end of COVID, the church has had wafers “marked” with wine, so you can take the body and the blood together, or you can take both, the body and the blood together then a sip from the cup (more of the blood). But you cannot dip your wafer into the cup (intinct it) as you used to, as I did two weeks ago, though the guest priest said the cup was already in it, the wafer. He whispered it, but he didn’t stop me because I said, “I know”; then I had already done it before he could pull the cup away. But last week there was an announcement in the bulletin in red: “Don’t do that!” Or, exactly: RECEIVING COMMUNION: all are welcome at the Lord’s Table. Communion is available in both kinds (bread and wine), but please do not dip (intinct) the consecrated bread in the wine (each wafer has already been marked with consecrated wine).

The sermon on the back of the envelope was about the wilderness, which appeared in both the Old Testament reading from Isaiah 40 and the Gospel reading from Mark 1. It (the envelope) wanted us to know how it is this word in Hebrew and that word in Greek, as if any of the seven of us truly cared — not even Ted truly cared — also how it can be a place where the waste howls, or it can be utterly abandoned, a place of desolation.
          (I say I didn’t care if the Greek was one thing and the Hebrew was another, but I was remembering that the French was désert from the Latin desertum from desero, deserere, deserui, desertus, meaning ‘abandon’.)
          Where are we as we move through Advent, the envelope went on, as we move through Advent in a rush? Aren’t we buffeted back and forth between howling chaos — ostriches, satyrs, owls, and night hags — and feelings of abandonment, emptiness? So, John the Baptist calls to us as well: Make way, clear a path in our too-full or too-empty lives. Make way, the Savior is coming.
          Or something like that.
                                                       12/10/23

  from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

Ted has a (another) letter from his sister, Moira. The dead sister. He gets these from time to time—he doesn’t explain how. He doesn’t show them to me, or to anyone else, that I am aware of. We are to take them at his word.
          In this one, she describes even heaven as not ideal because “like earth, it is a creation of God and man between them and neither knows exactly what he wants. Moreover, they can’t agree. Moreover moreover, among men it seems to be theologians that will have the greatest say, and they are the least practical of all men—look how they struggle with Jesus’ parables, with paperclips, and with women, none of them as complicated as they would wish.”

Ted says to me, “What do you think?” “About?” “Who creates heaven and earth—let’s start there.”
          “It depends on which has the greater imagination,” I say (or should have, I forget which), “who is imagining whom.”
                                                                  12/09/23

And Kamala.

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

I had coffee with Nils Sundstrøm this morning. He comes to pick me up in his brother’s car—he doesn’t have one, he gets around town on an electric bike. How he gets out of town, I don’t know.
          He was telling me that Biden said sometime earlier this week something to the effect that he might not be running again if it were not for Trump, but Trump had to be defeated! “And no one said to Biden?—‘But you—and Hillary—are the only ones that can’t defeat him. Don’t you see that?’” This is Nils speaking.
          “To which he could have replied, I suppose,” Nils went on, “‘Well, and Kamala.’”
                                               12/07/23

Speaking of prophets.

 from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

“The sun will be darkened and the moon will not show its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be  shaken in those days.” (Mark 13:24b-25).
          Soon after, the world and all that is in it will cease to be. And no one will care because there will be no one left to care — did you think of that, Doomsday God (and your prophets)? The effect of all the fireworks of destruction will be no effect at all?

Speaking of the prophets and their “righteous zeal”: as if “righteousness” existed out there somewhere, ideal, unattached, not belonging to a self, as if there were any zeal that wasn’t self-righteous.
                                                                  12/05/23